"The country," Stefan Fabbre said.
He got out a biochemical journal from amongst socks and undershirts in his briefcase, put on dark-rimmed glasses, read. Kasimir pushed back wet hair that had fallen all over his forehead, read the sign on the windowsill that said do not lean our, stared at the shaking walls and the rain shuddering on the window, dozed.
He dreamed that walls were falling down around him. He woke scared as they pulled out of Okats. His friend sat looking out the window, white-faced and black-haired, confirming the isolation and disaster of Kasimir's dream. "Can't see anything," he said. "Night. Country's the only place where they have night left." He stared through the reflection of his own face into the night that filled his eyes with blessed darkness.
"So here we are on a train going to Aisnar," Kasimir said, "but we don't know that it's going to Aisnar. It might go to Peking."
"It might derail and we'll all be killed. And if we do come to Aisnar? What's Aisnar? Mere hearsay." – "That's morbid," Kasimir said, glimpsing again the walls collapsing. – "No, exhilarating," his friend answered. "Takes a lot of work to hold the world together, when you look at it that way. But it's worthwhile. Building up cities, holding up the roofs by an act of fidelity. Not faith. Fidelity." He gazed out the window through his reflected eyes. Kasimir shared a bar of mud-like chocolate with him. They came to Aisnar.
Rain fell in the gold-paved, ill-lit streets while the autobus to Vermare and Prevne waited for its passengers in South Square under dripping sycamores. The case rode in the back seat. A chicken with a string round its neck scratched the aisle for grain, a bushy-haired woman held the other end of the string, a drunk farmworker talked loudly to the driver as the bus groaned out of Aisnar southward into the country night, the same night, the blessed darkness.
"So I says to him, I says, you don't know what'll happen tomorrow – "
"Listen," said Kasimir, "if the universe is infinite, does that mean that everything that could possibly happen, is happening, somewhere, at some time?"
"Saturday, he says, Saturday."
"I don't know. It would. But we don't know what's possible. Thank God. If we did, I'd shoot myself, eh?"
"Come back Saturday, he says, and I says, Saturday be damned, I says."
In Vermare rain fell on the ruins of the Tower Keep, and the drunk got off leaving silence behind him. Stefan Fabbre looked glum, said he had a sore throat, and fell into a quick, weary sleep. His head jiggled to the ruts and bumps of the foothill road as the bus ran westward clearing a tunnel through solid black with its headlights. A tree, a great oak, bent down suddenly to shelter it. The doors opened admitting clean air, flashlights, boots and caps. Brushing back his fair hair Kasimir said softly, "Always happens. Only six miles from the border here." They felt in their breast-pockets, handed over. "Fabbre Stefan, domicile 136 Tome Street, Krasnoy, student, MR 64100282A. Augeskar Kasimir, domicile 4 Sorden Street, Krasnoy, student, MR 80104944A. Where are you going?" – "Prevne." – "Both of you? Business?" – "Vacation. A week in the country." – "What's that?" – "A bass-viol case." – "What's in it?" – "A bass viol." It was stood up, opened, closed again, lugged out, laid on the ground, opened again, and the huge viol stood fragile and magnificent among flashlights over the mud, boots, belt-buckles, caps. "Keep it off the ground!" Kasimir said in a sharp voice, and Stefan pushed in front of him. They fingered it, shook it. "Here, Kasi, does this unscrew? – No, there's no way to take it apart." The fat one slapped the great shining curve of wood saying something about his wife so that Stefan laughed, but the viol tilted in another's hands, a tuning-peg squawked, and on the patter of rain and mutter of the bus-engine idling, a booming twang uncurled, broken off short like the viol-string. Stefan took hold of Kasimir's arm. After the bus had started again they sat side by side in the warm stinking darkness. Kasimir said, "Sorry, Stefan. Thanks."
"Can you fix it?"
"Yes, just the peg snapped. I can fix it."
"Damn sore throat." Stefan rubbed his head and left his hands over his eyes. "Taking cold. Damn rain."
"We're near Prevne now."
In Prevne very fine rain drifted down one street between two streetlamps. Behind the roofs something loomed – treetops, hills? No one met them since Kasimir had forgotten to write which night they were coming. Returning from the one public telephone, he joined Stefan and the bass-viol case at a table of the Post-Telephone Bar. "Father has the car out on a call. We can walk or wait here. Sorry." His long fair face was discouraged; contrite. "It's a couple of miles." They set off. They walked in silence up a dirt road in rain and darkness between fields. The air smelt of wet earth. Kasimir began to whistle but the rain wet his lips, he stopped. It was so dark that they walked slowly, not able to see where each step took them, whether the road was rough or plain. It was so still that they heard the multitudinous whisper of the rain on fields to left and right. They were climbing. The hill loomed ahead of them, solider darkness. Stefan stopped to turn up his wet coatcollar and because he was dizzy. As he went forward again in the chill whispering country silence he heard a soft clear sound, a girl laughing behind the hill. Lights sprang up at the hillcrest, sparkling, waving. "What's that?" he said stopping unnerved in the broken dark. A child shouted, "There they are!" The lights above them danced and descended, they were encircled by lanterns, flashlights, voices calling, faces and arms lit by flashes and vanishing again into night; clearly once more, right at his side, the sweet laugh rang out. "Father didn't come back and you didn't come, so we all came to meet you." – "Did you bring your friend, where is he?" – "Hello, Kasi!" Kasimir's fair head bent to another in the gleam of a lantern. "Where's your fiddle, didn't you bring it?" – "It's been raining like this all week." – "Left it with Mr Praspayets at the Post-Telephone." – "Let's go on and get it, it's lovely walking." – "I'm Bendika, are you Stefan?" She laughed as they sought each other's hands to shake in darkness; she turned her lantern round and was dark-haired, as tall as her brother, the only one of them he saw clearly before they all went back down the road talking, laughing, flashing lightbeams over the road and roadside weeds or up into the rain-thick air. He saw them all for a moment in the bar as Kasimir got his bull-fiddle: two boys, a man, tall Bendika, the young blonde one who had kissed Kasimir, another still younger, all of them he saw all at once and then they were off up the road again and he must wonder which of the three girls, or was it four, had laughed before they met. The chill rain picked at his hot face. Beside him, beaming a flashlight so they could see the road, the man said, "I'm Joachim Bret." – "Enzymes," Stefan replied hoarsely. – "Yes, what's your field?" – "Molecular genetics." – "No! too good! you work with Metor, then? Catch me up, will you? Do you see the American journals?" They talked helices for half a mile, Bret voluble, Stefan laconic as he was still dizzy and still listened for the laugh; but all of them laughed, he could not be sure. They all fell silent a moment, only the two boys ran far ahead, calling. "There's the house," tall Bendika said beside him, pointing to a yellow gleam. "Still with us, Stefan?" Kasimir called from somewhere in the dark. He growled yes, resenting the silly good cheer, the running and calling and laughing, the enthusiastic jerky Bret, the yellow windows that to all of them were home but to him not. Inside the house they shed wet coats, spread, multiplied, regathered around a table in a high dark room shot through with noise and lamplight, for coffee and coffeecake borne in by Kasimir's mother. She walked hurried and tranquil under a grey and dark-brown coronet of braids. Bass-viol-shaped, mother of seven, she merged Stefan with all the other young people whom she distinguished one from another only by name. They were named Valeria, Bendika, Antony, Bruna, Kasimir, Joachim, Paul. They joked and chattered, the little dark girl screamed with laughter, Kasimir's fair hair fell over his eyes, the two boys of eleven squabbled, the gaunt smiling man sat with a guitar and presently played, his face beaked like a crow's over the instrument. His right hand plucking the strings was slightly crippled or deformed. They sang, all but Stefan who did
not know the songs, had a sore throat, would not sing, sat rancorous amid the singers. Dr Augeskar came in. He shook Kasimir's hand, welcoming and effacing him, a tall king with a slender and unlikely heir. "Where's your friend? Sorry I couldn't meet you, had an emergency up the road. Appendectomy on the dining table. Like carving the Christmas goose. Get to bed, Antony. Bendika, get me a glass. Joachim? You, Fabbre?" He poured out red wine and sat down with them at the great round table. They sang again. Augeskar suggested the songs, his voice led the others; he filled the room. The fair daughter flirted with him, the little dark one screeched with laughter, Bendika teased Kasimir, Bret sang a love-song in Swedish; it was only eleven o'clock. Dr Augeskar had grey eyes, clear under blond brows. Stefan met their stare. "You've got a cold?" – "Yes." – "Then go to bed. Diana! where does Fabbre sleep?" Kasimir jumped up contrite, led Stefan upstairs and through corridors and rooms all smelling of hay and rain. "When's breakfast?" – "Oh, anytime," for Kasimir never knew the time of any event. "Good night, Stefan." But it was a bad night, miserable, and all through it Bret's crippled hand snapped off one great coiling string after another with a booming twang while he explained, "This is how you go after them the latest," grinning. In the morning Stefan could not get up. Sunlit walls leaned inward over the bed and the sky came stretching in the windows, a huge blue balloon. He lay there. He hid his pin-stiff aching black hair under his hands and moaned. The tall golden-grey man came in and said to him with perfect certainty, "My boy, you're sick." It was balm. Sick, he was sick, the walls and sky were all right. "A very respectable fever you're running," said the doctor and Stefan smiled, near tears, feeling himself respectable, lapped in the broad indifferent tenderness of the big man who was kingly, certain, uncaring as sunlight in the sky. But in the forests and caves and small crowded rooms of his fever no sunlight came, and after a time no water.
The house stood quiet in the September sunlight and dark.
That night Mrs Augeskar, yarn, needle, sock poised one moment in her hands, lifted her braid-crowned head, listening as she had listened years ago to her first son, Kasimir, crying out in sleep in his crib upstairs. "Poor child," she whispered. And Bruna raised her fair head listening too, for the first time, hearing the solitary cry from the forests where she had never been. The house stood still around them. On the second day the boys played outdoors till rain fell and night fell. Kasimir stood in the kitchen sawing on his bull-fiddle, his face by the shining neck of the instrument quiet and closed, keeping right on when others came in to perch on stools and lean against the sink and talk, for after all there were seven young people there on vacation, they could not stay silent. But under their voices the deep, weak, singing voice of Kasimir's fiddle went on wordless, like a cry from the depths of the forest; so that Bruna suddenly past patience and dependence, solitary, not the third daughter and fourth child and one of the young people, slipped away and went upstairs to see what it was like, this grave sickness, this mortality.
It was not like anything. The young man slept. His face was white, his hair black on white linen: clear as printed words, but in a foreign language.
She came down and told her mother she had looked in, he was sleeping quietly; true enough, but not the truth. What she had confirmed up there was that she was now ready to leam the way through the forest; she had come of age, and was now capable of dying.
He was her guide, the young man who had come in out of the rain with a case of pneumonia. On the afternoon of the fifth day she went up to his room again. He was lying there getting well, weak and content, thinking about a morning ten years ago when he had walked out with his father and grandfather past the quarries, an April morning on a dry plain awash with sunlight and blue flowers. After they had passed the Chorin Company quarries they suddenly began to talk politics, and he understood that they had come out of town onto the empty plain in order to say things aloud, in order to let him hear what his father said: "There'll always be enough ants to fill up all the ant-hills – worker ants, army ants." And the grandfather, the dry, bitter, fitful man, in his seventies angrier and gentler than his son, vulnerable as his thirteen-year-old grandson: "Get out, Kosta, why don't you get out?" That was only a taunt. None of them would run away, or get away. A man, he walked with men across a barren plain blue with flowers in brief April; they shared with him their anger, their barren helpless obduracy and the brief blue fire of their anger. Talking aloud under the open sky, they gave him the key to the house of manhood, the prison where they lived and he would live. But they had known other houses. He had not. Once his grandfather, Stefan Fabbre, put his hand on young Stefan's shoulder while he spoke. "What would we do with freedom if we had it, Kosta? What has the West done with it? Eaten it. Put it in its belly. A great wondrous belly, that's the West. With a wise head on top of it, a man's head, with a man's mind and eyes – but the rest all belly. He can't walk any more. He sits at table eating, eating, thinking up machines to bring him more food, more food. Throwing food to the black and yellow rats under the table so they won't gnaw down the walls around him. There he sits, and here we are, with nothing in our bellies but air, air and cancer, air and rage. We can still walk. So we're yoked. Yoked to the foreign plow. When we smell food we bray and kick. – Are we men, though, Kosta? I doubt it." All the time his hand lay on the boy's shoulder, tender, almost deferent, because the boy had never seen his inheritance at all but had been born in jail, where nothing is any good, no anger, understanding, or pride, nothing is any good except obduracy, except fidelity. Those remain, said the weight of the old man's hand on his shoulder. So when a blonde girl came into his room where he lay weak and content, he looked at her from that sunwashed barren April plain with trust and welcome, it being irrelevant to this moment that his grandfather had died in a deportation train and his father had been shot along with forty-two other men on the plain outside town in the reprisals of 1956. "How do you feel?" she said, and he said, "Fine."
"Can I bring you anything?"
He shook his head, the same black-and-white head she had seen clear and unintelligible as Greek words on a white page, but now his eyes were open and he spoke her language. It was the same voice that had called faintly from the black woods of fever, the neighborhood of death, a few nights ago, which now said, "I can't remember your name." He was very nice, he was a nice fellow, this Stefan Fabbre, embarrassed by lying there sick, glad to see her. "I'm Bruna, I come next after Kasi. Would you like some books? Are you getting bored yet?" – "Bored? No. You don't know how good it is to lie here doing nothing, I've never done that. Your parents are so kind, and this big house, and the fields outside there – I lie here thinking, Jesus, is this me? In all this peace, in all this space, in a room to myself doing nothing?" She laughed, by which he knew her: the one who had laughed in rain and darkness before lights broke over the hill. Her fair hair was parted in the middle and waved on each side down nearly to the light, thick eyebrows; her eyes were an indeterminate color, unclear, grey-brown or grey. He heard it now indoors in daylight, the tender and exultant laugh. "Oh you beauty, you fine proud filly-foal never broken to harness, you scared and restive, gentle girl laughing. . . ."
Wanting to keep her he asked, "Have you always lived here?" and she said, "Yes, summers," glancing at him from her indeterminate, shining eyes in the shadow of fair hair. "Where did you grow up?"
"In Sfaroy Kampe, up north."
"Your family's still there?"
"My sister lives there." She still asked about families. She must be very innocent, more elusive and intact even than Kasimir, who placed his reality beyond the touch of any hands or asking of identity. Still to keep her with him, he said, "I lie here thinking. I've thought more already today than in the last three years."
"What do you think of?"
"Of the Hungarian nobleman, do you know that story? The one that was taken prisoner by the Turks, and sold as a slave. It was in the sixteenth century. Well, a Turk bought him, and yoked him to a plow, like an ox, and he plowed the fields
, driven with a whip. His family finally managed to buy him back. And he went home, and got his sword, and went back to the battlefields. And there he took prisoner the Turk that had bought him, owned him. Took the Turk back to his manor. Took the chains off him, had him brought outside. And the poor Turk looked around for the impaling stake, you know, or the pitch they'd rub on him and set fire to, or the dogs, or at least the whip. But there was nothing. Only the Hungarian, the man he'd bought and sold. And the Hungarian said, "Go on back home…"
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